Search This Blog

Learning in the Digital Age: The Reality and the Myth

Let me tell you story of the great
bear. It's a story from First Nations People who lived near where I was born in
Canada, the Iroquois people. It's a story from long ago.

They didn't have very much. They
had a small community around a campfire. They lived on deer and rabbit.

Time passed and a great bear came
to plague their campground. Every day when they woke up, they could see the
tracks of the bear around their campsite. The bear was eating all the game,
eating all the deer, eating all the rabbits. The people began to starve.

They sent hunters out to shoot
the bear, but when they shot bows and arrows at the bear, the arrows just
bounced off. The bear would kill the warriors. One or two would straggle back
and say, "The bear killed us." They were getting desperate and they
didn't know what to do.

Finally, three warriors on the
same night had the same dream. They said, "I dreamed that I killed the
great bear. I dreamed that we went together and we shot the bear. The bear bled
and the bear died."

The chief decided that it's a
spirit dream; it must be true. He sent the three warriors, even though they
were his best three warriors.

They went out and they shot the
bear. They were able to draw blood. They chased the bear. The bear was
bleeding. They continued to chase around and around, but they never caught the
bear.

To this day, when you look up in
the fall sky, you can see the stars, three hunters chasing the bear. You know
that they're chasing the bear because the leaves all turn red, which is the
blood of the bear that they shot.

It's
through the creation of myths that we talk to each other. Our myths are not
just explanations of where the stars come from or why the leaves turn red.
They're the expressions of the full range of human emotion, from human reason
to irony, to anger, to argument, to explanation.

We
speak in myth because reality is ineffable. It cannot be expressed in words.
All language is, as in the first instance, based in myth, based in some
idealization, some abstraction.

We
forget this. We think today as though what we say expresses reality in some
way. It's as though our words were fully and literally true, but this is seldom
the case. Even the words themselves are metaphors, capturing reality through
myth.

You
might think, how can this be? When you look at language itself, you can see
this. There's a French word, croc.
I'm picking French because it's not English and it's not Estonian. It's
neutral. You can think of your own language and see if this is true.

We
have the French word croc, which
means tooth or fang, something crooked, something hooked. We have the idea of
the crocodile, an animal with fangs. We have in French the idea of crochet, and
to crochet is to create a rug using hooks. We have the idea of entre crochet in French, between the
brackets, between the hooks. You have crochet a bouton, or button hooks, the
things you use. Or, in French, a crochet
du gauche, a right hook.

You
see this over and over, in French and in other languages, how the single root
morphs and twists. The single concept creates the image that underlies all of
our concepts into the future.

We
comprehend the future in terms of what we understand today. This is the basis
of the origin of these myths. This is really important to understand.

When
we start talking about what cannot be known we lose our place or we experience
only confusion. We are lost in a swirl of chaos. It's chaos that, in fact,
characterizes all reality.

We
project our thoughts, our ideas, our beliefs, our features onto the chaos. This
is how we understand the chaos. We look at the chaos and we see ourselves. In
seeing ourselves in the chaos, we comprehend the chaos, but it's a myth. A lot
of the time these patterns, these projections, are primal and basic like bears,
like tragedy, like fangs and hooks.

At
the same time, as we try to comprehend the future, we also make the future. We
strive to make tomorrow safe and comfortable as it was for us in the past, or
at least a mythical past ‑‑ a hearth, a home, a story, a family, a community.
Another myth.

Sisyphus, you may know, sought to
cheat death and he succeeded.

But he was caught by the gods and
punished by being sentenced to push the boulder up the hill forever.

When he gets the boulder to the
top of the hill, of course, the boulder rolls down the hill. He goes down the
hill after it, and has to push the boulder up, and so on for the rest of time.

"The
Myth of Sisyphus," it's very famous, very well known.

When
we worry about the future, when we worry about the Internet, when we worry
about e‑learning it's not because we don't know what to expect, it's not the
unknown. It's because when we project into the future, we project a future like
"The Myth of Sisyphus." We project a future that has been taken away
from us by some nameless form, e‑learning, and replaced with pointless labour
at the service of the gods.

In
a future that's constantly changing, a future that we can never comprehend, a
future where our degrees mean nothing a year or two years after we got them.
That's a future we saw described just yesterday. It appears to be a future
where we have no hope like Sisyphus.

In
such a scenario, e‑learning does not appear to be a solution at all. Rather, it
seems to be a surrender, a ceding of our authority, our independence and our
autonomy.

One
thinks of Adam Curtis' videography "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving
Grace." If you're not familiar with it, I certainly recommend you look it
up and set aside several hours.

What
Curtis is saying is the Internet age brings us into an age where we lose our
independence and autonomy and become parts in this large machine, that our
contribution to knowledge is beyond our control, that there is no room for the
individual, the thinker, the creator, the idealist. The only future is the one
that's created as society as a whole that is, as Curtis says, all watched over
by these machines.

Some
would have a say it's a future that we have to accept. Camus would say,
"The struggle itself is enough to fill man's heart." One must imagine
Sisyphus as happy.

These
days we say, "Well, at least Sisyphus has a job." We forget. We
forget that Sisyphus achieved his objective. He set out to defy death, and in
the end that's what he got, but it was at the cost of eternal labour. It's this
cost that makes us wary.

When
people point to things and say, "It's just a myth, you're wrong,"
it's almost like they're asking us to surrender to this inevitability like
Sisyphus. What we hope and dream has no meaning or, worse, will be realized and
shown not to be gold, but to be worthless dross.

It's
funny how most myths seem to finish this way. The hunter forever chasing the
golden bear, Sisyphus forever pushing the boulder up the hill.

For
all that, we never stop creating these myths. We never stop trying to
understand the world, trying to comprehend the world by drawing pictures,
telling stories and imagining what it could be.

Steve
Wheeler tells us the idea of the digital natives or the net generation is a
myth. Of course it's a myth. It's just a story that Don Tapscott tells and you
should not believe that what Don Tapscott tells is true. It's a myth. We
shouldn't think of it as true.

It's
also a way of understanding the world and that's the value we need to draw from
it. It's a way of saying that our children are different from us. They have
different experiences, they have different ways of seeing the world, they are
different people.

Simply
saying, "This is a myth," washes all of that under the bridge,
reassures us that our view of the world is on solid ground. Why worry about
change? It's all just illusion, it's all just a myth. You may have dreams, but
the reality is it's all just a myth.

We
are warned by the story of Adam and Eve; we are warned by the story of
Prometheus, who stole the secret of fire from the gods, to be aware of the
dangers of too much knowledge. As Plutarch, so we are told, says, "The
mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled."

Again,
we can look at these myths as not-real representations of the story of creation
or the story of the discovery of fire. Or we can look at these myths as
cautions, not against education in general, but against a certain approach to
education.

We
can see these myths as telling us, with some clarity, that knowledge is not
something simply to be consumed, like an apple, that knowledge is not something
that can be stolen from the gods like fire. I thought Christian Port yesterday
expressed this really well. I think we were all interested to hear his
presentation.

"Imagine," he said,
"we built a robot." I love the myth making in the middle of a talk.

"Imagine," he said,
"we built a robot and sent it to a planet where there's something we need
like some ore. We programmed the robot, the more you mine the better you
feel." Remember that?

The robot learns, over time, to
know itself. It comes to realize that there's a button that makes it feel
better, so instead of learning how to mine the ore, it learns how to press the
button.

Port
asks, "What is it that motivates a human being to develop, to move
on?" He says, "It's in the central nervous system where we get
dopamine. We press the dopamine button and the outcome becomes a culture of
cheating." It's like artificial sweetener. It's like caffeine. I love
caffeine. It's like drugs, it's like green, it's like Facebook friends, it's
like e‑learning.

The
concern that e‑learning is this thing that our myths warn us about. It's a
shortcut. It's the pressing of the button. It's the activation of the dopamine,
but it's not really the learning.

What
is this feeling? It gives us a confused feeling. The myth gives us two
elements. It's an expression of what we want, but it's a warning about getting
what we want too easily.

Steve
Wheeler talking about myths, I counted seven in all. I probably could have kept
going. You analyze his talk; all of his myths really are cautions against the
easy score.

Consider
what he says about learning styles. They're a lot of nonsense. You'll read
that. There's all kinds of studies that say learning styles are nonsense.

He
says, "There is one true thing. There are as many learning styles as there
are people. The problem," he says quite accurately, "with learning
styles is they try to pigeon-hole students into categories. They try to define
students by the activities you impose on them based on what you believe as
teachers."

If
we think about learning styles as the magic shortcut to more effective
learning, we are deluding ourselves. Even if it is true that people learn
differently, and it is true that people learn differently, we don't achieve
magical results simply by catering to that.

A
learning style isn't a shortcut to memory because learning isn't about
remembering at all. It's a myth, but it's useful. It's a myth that tells us,
that warns us, that not all of our students are the same. They're not going to
react the same, and most importantly, they're not like us.

There's
a deeper lesson here that Wheeler touched on when he noted that learning styles
motif had been visited over and over by people like Mumford and COLT. We could
add Gregorc, Myers‑Briggs. We can also add that the stage‑based learning
models, Piaget, Bloom, method‑based approach in Gagne, or I saw this morning
the SECI model from Nonaka and Takeuchi ‑‑ I'm never good at pronouncing names ‑‑
described by Carayannis.

All
of these things where learning is described by slicing and dicing,
categorizing, drawing into stages, outlining a process. It's the same model in
each case where we're taking something very complex and trying to find little
bits in it. We're going to try to study these little bits, these little
segments, these little categories and that will be the shortcut to
understanding the difficult process of learning.

It's
modeling. That's fine if we understand that modeling is myth making. In
general, the approach of trying to pigeonhole students, pigeonhole stages of
learning or whatever leads to methodology. It leads to, on the one hand, a
struggle to understand the world, albeit without science, and on the other
hand, an attempt to realize our objectives more simply, more easily, an attempt
to create a shortcut.

It's
nonsense to say that there are no categories. There are categories. The world
is filled with categories. What it's nonsense to say is that these categories
are fundamental to learning, that they express the fundamental nature of
perception. It's nonsense to say this categorization will, by itself, magically
lead to some new understanding as though our mythical categorizations somehow
expose the nature of reality.

We
do not make things simpler by multiplying entities. We do not make things
clearer by breaking them down into parts, though we are tempted to do so.

Today's
candidate for breaking things into parts and making them simpler, so‑called, is
competencies, as though we can understand the really difficult nature of
mathematics by understanding 10 subsets of mathematics or whatever. In my mind,
searching for competencies is taking one really difficult problem and breaking
it down into 10 really difficult problems.

Another
myth. I was up this morning preparing this presentation, watching the news in
English. You may have seen this if you were listening in English.

You
may have actually seen this commercial from DuPont and this is a quote.
"The need for science‑based solutions is more pressing, as is the
collaboration to find them. Coming together is how we will better protect the
Earth and the billions on it."

So
says DuPont. So says, in her own way, Alison Littlejohn. She tells us,
"People first connect, then they consume and use the knowledge, then they
create new knowledge, an artefact, a conversation, a trace, etc."

She
gave us the use case of Sally, the new chemist, who has to create a new
substrate for drilling a new type of rock. I don't know what that means because
I don't know much about drilling. She needs to create a new tech. I'm drawing
that from "Star Trek."

She
says that you draw from a whole range of different resources. You also draw
from knowledge of different range of people and, at any point, you may be
working as an individual, group, network, collective, etc. You connect, create,
contribute, or you join with others with similar goals. This turns out to be
central to the presentation.

"What
are the binding forces," she asks, "that draw people or resources
together?" Via social constructivism, people communicate via knowledge
objects. People communicate working in networks, etc.

I'm
sitting there. I'm asking myself, how do I understand this? I can't understand
it literally. She's talking about binding forces that draw us together as
though we must succumb to being joined together by some external force like
what, gravity?

The
myth somewhere through the talk has become the reality. She says, "We need
something, an object, that brings people together, but what is this object? In
turning, we use a goal as that object." I loved this. I really did.

There's
in English two words, objective and objective, and object and object. You can
have an object, which is a thing, or you can have an object, which is a goal.
You have the same word with two different meanings and it's interesting to see
how the two different meanings slide together here.

We
have very traditional outcomes of this, various social objects such as work or
learning activities, reports, patient health case report, common problems,
learning goals, things that would be familiar to us from 20 years ago. The myth
making has served its purpose and brought us back to the comfortable and
familiar.

There's another myth you may be
familiar with. It's the story of King Midas.

King Midas was a very greedy
king, as you know, and was granted a wish based on a most thoughtless fantasy
that everything he touches turns into gold.

Of course, he starts turning
things into gold.

Everything seems really good
until his daughter comes for a goodnight kiss. He gives her a little kiss and
his daughter turns to gold.

As the web page where I got this
from, "Freezes solid like an Oscar statue." I love the way they use
metaphor in order to describe a myth.

Midas pleads to the gods for
nullification. He's able to wash away his gift and lives a virtuous life
thereafter.

We
can read the myth very superficially. You don't always want what you wish for,
or some things are worth more than gold.

I
draw a slightly deeper lesson, or at least to me it's deeper. I'm going to say
it's deeper because it's me. We often hear about gold of one sort or another
described as a prescription for everybody.

I
was thinking of Stephen Harris's school and these terms that he described it
just before this talk. Imagine if everybody had Stephen Harris's school. Would
that even be possible? Would it make sense or would it bankrupt the education
system? Can you imagine the furniture companies giving every school furniture?
Who would they sell to?

It's
not just that. In the North American context, there's this idea that everybody
should learn science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, or the so‑called
STEM courses, but if everybody learns science and technology, nobody's an
artist.

It's
not that there's no art in the world after that, there's no conception of art.
There's no way to represent art because we've lost the words. It does not
scale, cannot scale.

The
principle of the categorical imperative tells us when somebody prescribes
something as a solution, to imagine everybody in the world adopting that
solution and then to ask whether it makes sense.

Everything
turning to gold does not make sense. Everything turning into that one special
school does not make sense. Everything turning into science, technology,
engineering and mathematics does not make sense.

Sameness
is a myth. Sameness is the shortcut. We think, we are tempted to think, if
everything could be the same, it would be so much easier. It's inevitable, as
we learn from Prometheus, that in our efforts to make everything the same, we
destroy everything that we value and we come to discover that sameness is
meaningless without that value.

It's
classic myth formation. The approaching presence of some evil or danger,
globalization, the end of energy, I don't know, too many penguins. The only way
to respond to that danger is to become part of the whole, to work as a team, to
subsume our personal interests.

Why,
I would ask, should we suppose that sameness or subsumption to the whole will
solve the problem? Why is the push to collaboration, shared objectives, shared
goals, somehow the answer to whatever it is that's coming on us?

There
was a comment. Somebody made a comment in the session just before this one.
There are too many convening theories, incommensurable vocabularies, and we
could solve this if we had one vocabulary and one theory. That would fix that.

I
remember the RSS standards wars of the late `80s, early `90s. RSS was a
syndication format and there were too many different flavours of RSS.

Somebody
said, "Let's create a new standard and there will be just one standard
covering them all. We'll call it Atom." Then after that we had RSS and Atom,
two different standards.

Then
somebody said, "Let's create one standard that will bridge the gap between
RSS and Atom." Then we had three standards, and so it goes.

The
attempt to standardize creates multiplicity. Myths of conformity, as though
conformity makes better.

In
1793 they came up with the idea of interchangeable parts. Eli Whitney first put
this into practice in the manufacture of muskets. Saying this really worked, it
created more guns. We had the idea that in the long run, if we have sameness of
production, all the changes that need to be managed by management.

Here's
something from Duncan Kennedy. "Legal education is training for hierarchy.
Because students believe what they are told explicitly and implicitly about the
world they are entering, they behave in ways that fulfill the prophecies the
system makes about them and the world. This is the link‑back that completes the
system. Students do more than accept the way things are and ideology does more
than damp opposition. Students act affirmatively within the channels cut for
them, cutting them deeper, giving the whole patina of consent, and weaving
complicity into everyone's life story.

It's
Sisyphus all over again. Sameness simply brings us back to doing the same thing
over and over again at, if you will, the behest of the gods. If we lose our
difference we lose our meaning.

George
Orwell put it well. "It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering
white concrete soaring up terrace after terrace 300 meters into the air. From
where Winston stood, it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face
in elegant lettering the three slogans of the party. War is peace. Freedom is
slavery. Ignorance is strength."

Sameness
breaks down the distinctions we need even to have a goal, or an ambition or a
dream.

An Indian legend, again.

I'm sure you're all familiar with
this legend, the six men of Hindustan who went to see the elephant. The problem
was, these men were blind and so they could not see the elephant.

Each man touched the elephant.

One man touched the side of the
elephant and said, "It's huge like a wall."

Another man touched the tusk of
the elephant and said, "It's sharp like a spear."

Another one touched the ear of
the elephant and he said, "It's flat and floppy like a leaf."

Another one touched the trunk of
the elephant and he said, "It's like a snake."

The myth ends with these men
fighting amongst each other, each of them sure because they had the experience
for themselves of what the elephant was like.

Of course, as the myth tells us,
none of them were wrong, but none of them were right.

It's
interesting where Janssen is talking about in omnia, talking about it being
lifelong learning, serendipity, but also entrepreneurship, e‑learning, m‑learning,
etc., helping people meet their goals. She points to, I think quite correctly,
adding value by combining competencies.

She
said, "In Nokia, they hired only engineers and that's where their problem
started." What they tried to do instead was to bring together people who
were young, people who were old, people who were students, people who were
professionals. I think that was a good idea.

The
idea here was that people would do their learning in context, so it would have
real meaning for them. They would have opportunities to succeed and to fail,
where the intent was to bring out the expertise in everyone, the different
types of expertise.

The
other side of her story was that these teams were to be entrepreneurial. They
were to create entities that would compete in a marketplace. We have also in
this picture this myth of the marketplace, this myth of the commercial approach
solving the problems that the management approach cannot solve. It's the
invisible hand of the marketplace, the myth created by Adam Smith. Surely, we
don't think that this is real.

I
ran in my newsletter just the other day a report showing that study after study
has looked for evidence that the marketplace moves forward toward some
advantage, some stable position, some progress, but there is no built‑in
advantage to the invisible hand of the marketplace. The invisible hand of the
marketplace is a myth. There is no guiding hand. There's just chaos.

Here's
a model for understanding this chaos. It's just a myth, but it's a good myth.
It will help us see through some of these other myths. It's called the TIMN
theory, tribes, institutions, markets and networks. It describes the evolution
of organization over the years. It may well be familiar to many of you.

It
also describes forms of learning. When you think of tribes and apprenticeships
in the same light, institutions representing the model of professors, scholars
and scholarship. Markets representing the model of arguments, debate, the
clashes of ideas, classes, categories and theories, etc., and networks as
communications. I put in my notes here creativity.

The
first two models are built on a kind of sameness, the sameness of genetics, the
sameness of family. The last two are based on types of diversity. One type of
diversity results in Atomism. The other type of diversity results in networks.

Putting
somebody into entrepreneurship programs is putting them into competitive
markets. It's preparing them for, I would say, the world of the 1990s, the
world before the Internet, the world before we began communicating with each
other in these networks.

It's
interesting. Steve Wheeler talking about the flipped classroom, talking about
the real flip, the flip toward what he called bear pit pedagogy, having them
fight it out, debate it, arguing from both sides.

I
listen to that and I think of the competitive market approach. Having students
argue and debate is like having students try to create companies, try to compete
against each other and, again, preparing for the market model of the 1990s.

What
I want to say about myths is the same thing that I want to say about learning.
It's that the content of the story is, for all practical purposes, irrelevant.
That doesn't mean that there's no content. It just means that the content is
the thing that moves the learning forward.

What
matters in learning is not what is said, but how it is said. As McLuhan would
say, the meaning is, in fact, in the message or, maybe to paraphrase him a bit,
the meaning is in the mode of the message.

The
TIMN model, again, different ways of teaching. The tribe model, story by the
campfire. The institution model, a lecture by a university professor. The
markets model, a shouting debate. The network model, a conversation.

People
like Weinberger and others tried to say this in the "Cluetrain
Manifesto," markets are conversations. What he should have said, in my
mind, is that our markets are becoming networks. Competition is becoming
conversation.

Networks
aren't a shortcut, either. Networks aren't the magic solution any other than
markets are the magic solution, any more than professors are the magic
solution. Networks have to avoid two forms of what might be called network
death.

On
the one hand, collapsing into sameness. That might be called the collaborative principle where every
entity in the network becomes the same and, consequently, all dialogue, all
meaning, ceases.

On
the other hand, the network has to avoid disintegration into atoms. That might
be called the competitive principle
where the network falls apart. Both the social and the individual are forms of
network death. What we want is that happy middle ground where the network is dynamic
and capable of reacting, adapting and adjusting to the future.

I've
tried to describe in my own work methodological principles that allow networks
to do this. Of course, these are myths as well, but they're practical myths. As
long as we don't think of them as describing reality, we can use them the way
we can use other myths. The principles are autonomy, diversity, openness and
interactivity.

It's
interesting when we look at the myths, when we look at the myths that I've
talked about so far in this talk, that in many cases, arguably all of the
cases, the myths are warning us against abandoning diversity, against
abandoning openness. They warn us against trying to make everything the same.
They warn us against trying to determine the objectives, the goals, the values
of people.

In
my own work with a number of my colleagues, people like George Siemens, David
Cormier, Rita Kop and others, we've created a type of online learning called
the MOOC, or massive open online course. What a MOOC is, is a recognition. It
is first of all a recognition that there are no shortcuts, that we are not
going to try to design e‑learning as simply a faster way of cramming content
into people's heads.

That
would be failing to heed the lessons from the past, the lessons that go all the
way back to Prometheus, Sisyphus and the rest. A MOOC in the parlance of this
talk is about creating a future, not succumbing to it. Kristjan Korjus talked
about the open organization of the students at Tartu. This is the same
principle, only applied to a single course.

Success
in the course is what you determine it to be. Participation in the course is
what you want it to be. There is no content in the course. There are topics. We
talk about different things. Each week we may bring in a guest or we may talk
about some concept or idea, but it's a lot like the artist that was described,
I forget which talk it was. I think it was Stephen Harris's.

The
artist, instead of teaching his students how to paint, went to the class and
painted and led his class all the way through the process from painting all the
way to hanging it in the gallery. Yeah, it was Steve Harris.

The
content is like that. It's what the instructor does, but it's not something
that the student has to consume and memorize. There is no content or,
conversely, there's too much content. The student needs to navigate or learn to
navigate through this by connecting with themselves, by connecting with other
people.

The
idea here isn't to teach content, but to start as a starting point for our thinking.
You might ask, what's the purpose, what's the objective if there is no content?
There is no purpose. There is no objective. More accurately, each person
decides what their own purpose is. The idea here is to promote diversity and
promote autonomy.

There
is a process that we talk about and recommend. It's only talked about and
recommended, it's not required, of aggregation, remix, re‑purpose, feed
forward. Very similar to what Alison's proposal talked about, but without
filtering, without creating, without evaluation.

I
was going to say I’m more interested in people creating, but that would be
incorrect. I’m more interested in people conversing with each other, using
objects to express their hopes, their fears, their ideas, their dreams,
creating their own myths.

Not
pedagogy, there is a way of talking about the skills that would be required to
flourish in such an environment. I sometimes talk about them under the rubric
of critical literacies.

They
range all the way from the skills involved in arguing, as Steve talked about,
to skills involved in recognizing patterns, motifs, principles, organizations.
Also, the pragmatics, the use of symbols and images, the context, the
placement, and the frame in our world view and understanding change, dynamics,
evolution, and prediction in this environment.

These
are skills you don't get in front of a classroom, say, "OK, we'll start
with skill number one, part A." These are skills you acquire only in an
environment where you see them and you acquire them by doing them, by
practicing in them, by conversing, using the language in which these skills
demonstrate success.

I'll
finish off with one more myth.

It's
a story by Arthur C. Clark called "The Nine Billion Names of God."

There were some monks in the
Himalayas. They'd been working for the last 300 years and they developed a new
language. They're laboriously writing down, one by one, each of the nine
billion names of God.

It's calculated it will take them
another 13,000 years to finish.

When some Westerners arrive at
their monastery and they talk about computers, the monks think and the
Westerners think this could be a really good shortcut.

We could get the computers to
write out all the names of God for us. That's what they do. They set up
computers.

The Westerners are very careful
because what's going to happen after you write out the nine billion names of
God? Well, nothing.

The Westerners set up the
computer to print out the names of all the nine billion names of God, but to
finish printing only after they've left so the monks won't be mad at them.

The story ends with the
Westerners are climbing down the hill and the computer finishes churning out
all the nine billion names of God.

They're walking down the
mountain. They look up and, one by one, very simply, the stars are all going
out without any fuss.

I
was thinking about Arthur Harkins' talk, cyborgs and preparing for the
Information Age, preparing for the 1970s, and thinking about preparing for an
age when computers take over. That's the future I was asked in the previous
session, what's the future you most fear? It's the future where the nine
billion humans are each, one by one, replaced by a computer.

It's
conceivable. We can think about it, but you know that there's a new myth here
as well.

The
myth is that, one by one, each human is replaced by a machine, nine billion of
them. After all this time, the machines are able to have perfect conversation
with each other, no ambiguity, no misunderstanding, an ideal language, complete
comprehension. They discover with all the humans gone there's nothing left to
talk about.

We
can imagine a future filled with machines. We can't imagine a future without
meaning. We have to continually hope for the impossible, not the possible,
because if our ambitions were actually achieved, it would be a disaster.

Comments

I'll read and feel and sniff and touch this .. several more times..Then perhaps I'll be ready to start absorbing it..Later I may understand or recognize it betterThen I will apply it .. or try itI believe its about inspirationand the family of man.. woman .. childand not necessarily in that order

It's been a while since an article this long has held my interest but here, I couldn't stop reading.

There are so many points that I'd love to add my $0.02 worth to but one in particular really resonated, at least for me:

"It is first of all a recognition that there are no shortcuts, that we are not going to try to design e‑learning as simply a faster way of cramming content into people's heads."

I'd like to amend the statement to read:

"It is first of all a recognition that there are no shortcuts, that we are not going to try to design e‑learning as simply a faster and cheaper way of cramming content into people's heads."

All too often, elearning is seen, not only as a shortcut but as a cheap shortcut for cramming content into peoples' heads.

If "filling the vessel" is the intended outcome, then elearning can be a cheaper, faster alternative. If creating a rich, vibrant, simulating learning environment is the goal then there is no quick, cheap way - online or face to face.

I have never seen more words used to say less, in 56 years of my life! (I take it your mother was a Rambler, and your father a Nash.) And yet, after all that effort(?), you failed to make a decent point.

BUT, Dear sir: I well understand your problem. Editing oneself is the hardest of jobs. And your stories. Oh, my! As a Canadian who has had Native and other friends! But I shall not say any more....

I will say that you could have something good and useful to say... buried in there, but you drowned it in meandering verbiage and jargon.

Why not do us all (including yourself) a favour, re-read it, edit yourself (it will take more than 1/2 hour!), and turn this.... thing... into something good, for the potential is there. And, I for one, certainly do hate to see good potential wasted.

I am sure a good editing job would straighten out the logic problems, the non-sequiteurs, and etc.... The resulting piece might also be slightly shorter. It would certainly be more useful, and would give you and your readers a "two products for the price of one". Some points might be clarified, some edited down, some elaborated, etc....

I think you owe it to anyone who wasted about 45 minutes trying to make sense of the thing. Especially to those who may have gotten the wrong idea out of some of the things you said. And those are the ones I worry about.

Please do take my words, and those of Mark Twain to heart. Thank you for your time and attention in this matter.

Nicely done. It's refreshing and heartening to see so many of us in the Canadian educational landscape trying to re-imagine what we are doing and what it's for. Your thoughts about purposes and objectives reminded me a lot of my IDEA classroom (http://rosslaird.com/courses/): "...each person decides what their own purpose is. The idea here is to promote diversity and promote autonomy."

Thanks for the read, Stephen. And I assume that the reference to Mark Twain meant his comment that "There are things you'll learn by holding a cat by the tail that can't be learned any other way." I can agree with that.